What the Doomsayers Haven’t Been Telling You About Greece

The recent battle over healthcare reform in the United States, in which the Obama administration was barely able to pass weak reform, is just further proof of how far the US has fallen behind Europe. Yet all the media has been able to obsess over for the last couple of months is – the Greek debt crisis!

By now of course everyone knows that Greece is in really tough shape, right? Practically at the cliff’s edge, ready to collapse? All the gloom and doomers have been telling us this for two months, so it must be true. But before we pronounce it so, let’s take a quick pop quiz:

Which country has less inequality, Greece or the United States? Which country has lower rates of infant mortality, Greece or the United States? Which country has greater age longevity and more affordable university education? Which country has a lower homicide rate and about one-tenth the number of people in prison, Greece or the United States? Which country has a lower rate of teenage births and lower rates of drug use? Which country emits far fewer carbon emissions per capita? Which country has affordable, universal health care for all its people, and pays about half as much money per person to receive it – Greece or the United States?

Surprisingly, the answer to all those questions is: Greece. Certainly Greece is going through a difficult spot in its long history, but how difficult depends on how you measure it. In some very important ways Greece is doing better than the United States (which also is saddled with enormous government deficits, as is virtually every country in the world, due to stimulus spending designed to jumpstart national economies after the global collapse).

Why then is gloom and doom all we hear about Greece, 24-7? A good part of the reason is ideological. With US government deficits soaring, conservatives from the teabaggers to Fox News to Senate Republicans are sounding the alarm about a return to ‘big government’. Recently, former GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani even stated that President Obama was moving the US towards – gasp – European socialism.

For conservatives like Giuliani, Glenn Beck and others, ‘Europe’ is a code word for ‘big government’, ‘high taxes’ and more recently ‘big deficits’. When they bash Europe they are really taking aim at government in the United States. All this talk of Greece – a small country that makes up only 2% of Europe’s economy – is being used to attack the Obama administration and its stimulus spending and budget deficits. ‘The US will end up like Greece!’ has become one of the conservatives’ rallying cries.

A second ideological front is glimpsed when you realise that most of the analysts and reporters are looking at this, not from the point of view of everyday Greeks, but from that of the bankers and bonds traders, and the investment class in general. The Electronic Investor Herd is skittish that they might not get paid back the money they have loaned to Greece. And most of the reportage on Greece’s situation comes from media outlets owned by corporations that reflect the commercial interests of its owners.

But from the average Greek person’s perspective, it matters little if Greece defaults on its debt or instead manages to roll over that debt at a high interest rate. Either way, Greece is going to have to enact austerity measures, and that will be a hardship for its people. Greece has been living beyond its means, rolling up deficit after deficit, and the bill has come due. In a country where many are able to retire at the age of 50 or 55, while the Germans are raising their retirement age to 67, this is not terribly surprising.

Even with Portugal’s economy (which is smaller than Greece’s) possibly added to the mix, this crisis has been manageable for the European Union. It’s not as if Europe is the only place suffering the aftershocks of the global economic earthquake that shook the world in 2008. California makes up 14% of the American economy, truly too big to fail, and had to issue IOUs to pay its bills and prevent default. California has been slashing social programmes and government jobs, and is being swamped by foreclosed homes. So why are we are hearing more about Greece than California? Because Greece has more rattled the investor class and the slavish corporate media that reflects its interests.

What’s more surprising is how much progressive media outlets also have echoed this simplistic ‘bad Greece’ storyline. Whether on NPR, the Huffington Post, or various European news outlets, many commentators have unleashed Greece-bashing tirades that have fed into the hysteria. Prominent among them has been Simon Johnson, a MIT professor and former International Monetary Fund economist who has departed from his usually sober and insightful analyses to become increasingly shrill with over-the-top gloom and doom predictions.

So Greece makes for a convenient punching bag for those who wish to score ideological points. If there’s any hope of ever having a more progressive government in the United States, we have to unwind this ‘government is evil’ conversation. Greece is just the latest episode in this longstanding, American-led Europe-bashing. Here is a sampling of the numerous gloom and doom headlines that have appeared in US media outlets in recent years, trumpeting the imminent collapse of Europe:

These alarming headlines appeared from 2003 until late 2006, when – surprise, surprise – it was discovered that the European economy actually was surging past the US economy. In fact, an article published in the international version of Newsweek on November 20, 2006, blared the headline ‘The Great Job Machine: Despite Its Laggard Reputation, Europe Continues to Grow Faster, and Create More Jobs, than America’ – yet that story never appeared in the domestic version of Newsweek.

Just as the media misreported weapons of mass destruction and completely missed an $8 trillion housing bubble, it frequently misreports Europe. The ideologically slanted US media continue to shield Americans from injections of reality that are badly needed to understand their country’s relative standing in the world. Even the reporting on street protests in Greece has been tinged with alarmist depictions calculated to scare Americans about Europe. I believe it’s a good sign that the Greeks are fighting to preserve their social contract from the marauding of the banks, the bonds traders and their previous governments that indebted them and then hid the debt with the help of Goldman Sachs. What I find truly worrying is that Californians, as well as their fellow Americans, are taking all of this lying down. There seems to be little fight in the American people, despite the lost ground.

And if there is little fight left in that Spirit of 1776 – and on top of that Americans don’t value government very much – they are never going to push for the adoption of better policies in which a smart and progressive government plays its suitable role, defined via the rough and tumble of politics.

A provocative, remedy-based perspective on the joint complexities of economic stability and ever expanding technology.–Kirkus Reviews

“Hill hits Silicon Valley darlings like Uber and Airbnb alongside the former online black market Silk Road, right-to-work laws, and factory robots all under the umbrella of “naked capitalism.” He explains how the rise of the “1099 workforce” is not limited to Silicon Valley; more and more traditional jobs in fields like manufacturing are turning to contractors to perform the same tasks full-time employees used to do. In addition to costing workers in benefits and safety nets, misclassifying workers as contractors costs federal and state governments billions of dollars annually in lost tax revenue.” ―Washington Monthly

“For anyone driven crazy by the faux warm and fuzzy PR of the so-called sharing economy Steven Hill’s Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers should be required reading… Hill is an extremely well-informed skeptic who presents a satisfyingly blistering critique of high tech’s disingenuous equating of sharing with profiteering…Hill includes two chapters listing potential solutions for the crises facing U.S. workers…Hill stresses the need for movement organizing to create a safety net strong enough to save the millions of workers currently being shafted in venture capital’s brave new world.” ―Counterpunch

“A growing underclass scrambling to make ends meet at the whim of increasingly picky and erratic employers, that number could balloon to 65 million within 10 years, or about half of the domestic workforce, warns Steven Hill in his troubling new book, Raw Deal. This brand of worker abuse cuts across industries and company size. Hill calls out Uber, AirBnb, Merck, Nissan, and dozens of others. Hill does a nice job of putting it in starker, easier-to-understand ways.” ―Washington Independent Review of Books

“Steven Hill’s book Raw Deal is a red-faced, steam-out-the-ears indictment of sharing apps. Yet Hill offers a pragmatic, almost post-ideological solution: “individual security accounts” for workers. Companies that use independent contractors, or offer scant benefits for employees, would have to add on a certain percentage of their pay as a contribution to those accounts, which would cover health care, unemployment insurance, and more. There’d be a mechanism ― and a requirement ― for companies to contribute to the long-term well-being even of workers who aren’t on their traditional payrolls.” ―Boston Globe

“Raw Deal is a book for its time. Steven Hill perfectly captures the anxiety of the American worker in today’s increasingly digital economy. Hill presents some compelling ideas, the most important being something he calls the Economic Singularity. In this unfortunate tipping point, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few results in economic implosion because the 99 percent can’t afford to buy anything the 1 percent has to sell. The United States is turning into a nation of 1099 workers who eke out a living driving cars, renting rooms and running errands for people who apparently have better things to do with their time. Throw in self-thinking computers and obedient robots, and there won’t be any work left for plain old Homo sapiens…Hill proposes that we offer 1099 workers a new safety net consisting of tax deductions, individual security accounts and multiemployer health care plans. All good ideas.” ― San Francisco Chronicle

This book is a must read for those concerned about how technology is disrupting the way we work and eroding the social safety net, and how policy makers should respond to ensure that the growing number of workers in the “gig” economy earn adequate benefits.—Laura D’Andrea Tyson, UC-Berkeley and former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

“Steven Hill’s groundbreaking book on the part-time, unstable ‘Uber Economy’ shows how a new sub-economy becomes a work of law-flouting regress undermining full-time work. Remote corporate algorithms run riot!”— Ralph Nader, consumer advocate

For many years, Steven Hill’s analysis, commentary and activism have helped shape our understanding of the U.S. political economy. His latest book, Raw Deal is A riveting expose that shows with alarming lucidity what Americans stand to lose if we don’t figure out how to rein in the technological giants that are threatening the American Dream.–Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation

In Raw Deal, Steven Hill documents in frightening detail the ways in which new forms of work promise to plunge US workers and their families into further economic hardship, risk-assumption, and instability. Fortunately, Hill does not simply anticipate catastrophe; he closes the book with an informed call for institutional reforms that would lessen the negative consequences of these potentially dangerous forms of work. Anyone concerned with US working conditions – whether American workers, worker advocates, labor market scholars, or policy-makers – must read this book .— Janet C. Gornick, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Director, LIS: Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Praise for Expand Social Security Now

“Read this book before you vote. Few issues are more important to your personal economic future. Steven Hill shows what’s at stake, and he offers solutions that Americans of all stripes can agree on.”—Robert B. Reich, author of “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few”

“Steven Hill has written a barn burner of a book. Or perhaps I should say ‘myth buster,’ because he systematically demolishes the false justifications for slashing Social Security. In place of misplaced animus and misleading arguments, he offers a strong case for dramatically expanding America’s most successful domestic program in an age of rising inequality and widespread financial insecurity.”—Jacob S. Hacker, coauthor of “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper”, Professor, Yale University

“Steven Hill has written a vigorous defense of Social Security, the country’s most important social program. While most political debate in recent years has focused on ways to cut Social Security or privatize it, Hill goes in the opposite direction and argues for a robust expansion. Hill proposes a Social Security program that would be adequate by itself to support a middle-class retirement.”—Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of “Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People”

“Steven Hill has produced a dynamite handbook for angry Americans who seek to take back democracy. The true contest is not Republicans versus Democrats. It is the American people versus Washington. And this is the sleeper issue the people can win. The governing elites in both parties are trying to eviscerate Social Security—arguably the most successful and most popular program created by the federal government. Hill explains why the political insiders and their Wall Street patrons are wrong about Social Security. He shows us how to mobilize to defeat the power elites and expand Social Security rather than destroy it.”—William Greider, author of “Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country”

Praise for Europe’s Promise

Financial Times: “Steven Hill is a lucid and engaging writer. He makes you sit up and think.”

The Economist: “In a new book, Steven Hill extols the European social contract for better government services. Life in Europe is more secure, he argues, and therefore more agreeable.”

Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker: “Like a reverse Alexis de Tocqueville, Steven Hill dauntlessly explores a society largely unknown to his compatriots back home.”

Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs: “Europe’s Promise is a timely and provocative book . . . the “social capitalist” policies of European countries represent best practices in handling most of the challenges modern democracies face today.”